Change Management for Oracle E-Business Suite (formerly delivered in the product "Oracle Application Change Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite" and abbreviated as "ACP" or "ACMP") provides a centralized view to monitor and orchestrate changes (both functional and technical) across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems. Change Management offers the capabilities to manage changes introduced by customizations, patches and functional setups during implementation or maintenance activities.
Change Management for Oracle E-Business Suite consists of two main components:
Patch Manager allows you to deploy patches across Oracle E-Business Suite instances from a single console. Patch Manager integrates with My Oracle Support and can automatically download and deploy patches across multiple (single or multi-node) Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Both Oracle E-Business Suite patches and patchsets, as well as patches created with Customization Manager, are supported.
Customization Manager automates the process of packaging, releasing, deploying, and migrating customizations for a single Oracle E-Business Suite instance or multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. It provides capabilities to integrate with third-party source control repositories to access customizations that need to be packaged. Before packaging the updates, Customization Manager validates the customization against software coding best practices. These custom packages can then be patched to Oracle E-Business Suite instances like any other Oracle Patch either using the Oracle Applications DBA (AD) utilities or using Patch Manager.
These components can be accessed from the central Change Management page, or dashboard, available from Targets > Oracle E-Business Suite > Administer > Change Management.
Simplifies the mechanism of orchestrating changes across multiple Oracle E-Business Suite systems.
Improves user productivity by automating the deployment of changes.
Reduces human errors by providing a standards-based change deployment framework.
Provides notifications to specified users of updates to the Oracle E-Business Suite systems.
Change Management thus helps to lower the total cost of ownership by providing these benefits from the central Oracle Enterprise Manager console which allows you to manage the entire application environment.
The Change Management Dashboard gives you quick access to commonly-used functions, as well as summaries of recent activity.
The Change Approval Requests region is available to users with the required roles. This Change Approval section shows the summary of recent change approval requests that have been updated. You can also search for a specific change approval request or navigate to the complete list by clicking the "Home" link.
For Patch Manager, recent patching activity is listed. The summary lists patch runs that have completed, that are in progress, or that are scheduled. You can click on the patch names to drill down to more information. You can also search for patches, go to the Patch Dashboard, or start/schedule a new patch application.
For Customization Manager, the most recently updated packages, for both Release 11i and Release 12, are shown. Recent activity regarding packages including their statuses is also shown. You can click on the package names to drill down for more information. You can search for packages, create new packages, set up your File Source and Oracle E-Business Suite mappings, or access reports. Also, you can manage custom applications and track requests pertaining to custom application registration/validation on one or more instances.
The Change Approval Framework helps ensure that all changes done using any of the products in Change Management go through a change approval mechanism. This change control mechanism entails one level of approval for any change that results in a configuration or code change of an Oracle E-Business Suite instance. The Change Approval Framework provides tracking and auditing with respect to the change control requests and historical data. A common change control tracking dashboard is provided for tracking all change requests within Change Management. Auto-approvals are possible if the requestor is a Super Administrator or has the respective approver role with approval target access.
All critical changes within Patch Manager and Customization Manager would need to go through the change control mechanism.
The main Change Management tab lists recent activity for change approval requests.
See the section Privileges for Change Management for information on required privileges.
Click on the Home link under Change Approval Requests on the Change Management to access the Change Approval Dashboard.
The Change Approval Dashboard allows users with the proper privileges to perform the following:
Search for requests as per role access.
Approve or reject a given change control request after viewing details.
Track heuristic data with respect to change control requests for auditing purposes using "Related History".
When using Change Management features, you will need to access Oracle E-Business Suite instances. You can set up credentials for these instances for every user as a one-time setup step instead of entering them every time you need to access an instance. Note that preferred credentials are not shared across users. See the section Setting Preferred Credentials for Change Management for more information.
You have the option of sending e-mail notifications to users regarding updates to the Oracle E-Business Suite systems. To have these notifications sent successfully, you must have the system set up properly:
Ensure that the agent on the Oracle Management Server is up and running.
Ensure that the command parDeploy has been run as part of the setup of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c.
Enter the SMTP information as described below.
To set the SMTP information in Oracle Enterprise Manager
The Outgoing SMTP Server information must be entered in Oracle Enterprise Manager.
Note: If the SMTP information is not set correctly, notifications will not be sent.
Within Oracle Enterprise Manager, navigate to Setup > Notifications > Notification Methods.
Set the Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server value.
Enter additional information as needed.
Oracle Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite includes diagnostic tests that should be run to ensure your system is set up correctly to use the pack's features. These tests are run using the Pack Diagnostics link under Related Links on the Oracle E-Business Suite Instances page. For more information on using the Pack Diagnostics link, see: Running Pack Diagnostics Tests.